Family Affairs

The recent news story of how the, now ex, Tory MP Derek Conway gave his son a rather unique student grant of £40,000 from his staff budget, has got me thinking about family business's. Of course there’s nothing wrong with wanting to have your children or other relatives work with you, unless as in Conway’s sleazy case the family are paid out of taxpayers money and don’t actually do the job. Though when the bosses son or daughter turns up at work their never going to be thought of as just another employee. Everyone views them as a obvious extension of the boss, a bit like Mini Me in the Austin Powers films.

TV is an incredibly nepotistic business, a great deal of people have got their ‘in’ because of Mum and Dad, Uncle Monty etc. Its quite understandable that having built a business up that you would like your offspring to inherit it, and not showing paternal favoritism to your employees you get your son or daughter to start at the bottom. Sadly this practice is just another bag of shit for me to hold. Because come every school holiday I get a little helper in the form of the boss’s son, lets call him Tarquin.

One day Tarquin will have his own facilities empire but right now he is learning it 'from the shop floor up'. Understandably Tarquin couldn’t jump in a edit suite and start cutting and he hasn’t got blonde hair and breasts so he couldn’t sit on reception (though the bosses daughter has, but I better not go there) so that leaves him with the lowly task of shadowing a runner all week, and I get a surly 16 year old to ‘help’ me out. But Tarqs really wishes he could be back home in Islington, staying in bed all day, smoking spliffs and playing his XBox 360 between wanks, so getting him to make a couple of cups of tea for Edit 5 (the Goodwin suite) is like asking him for help with emergency brain surgery.

So I have to be really careful what I say with a spy in the midst, I have to explain everything and don’t really get any help at all, and I have to put up with hearing ‘you know what I mean blud’ all the time. Funny I once looked forward to school holidays with such joy, now I fucking hate them!